Derby's most popular pub crawl has changed a great deal in the last 20 years. Here, Anton Rippon remembers when it was at its best.

It was the rite of passage for a generation of Derby drinkers. The pub crawl that you just had to do. Forget a weekend in Prague or Ibiza; this was the centrepiece for serious stag nights and hen parties. Sometimes it was simply a Saturday evening out.

Any way you want to remember it, it was The Mile.

At its peak, the number of pubs on The Mile ran into double figures.

Veteran Milers fondly recall the night beginning at the Derbyshire Yeoman, on Kingsway, and ending in the Wardwick, at the Lord Nelson – faint hearts may have called it a night at the Rising Sun – but today the original starting point of The Mile is no more. Where once the first pint was quaffed, now only fast food and coffee are available.

Drinkers on the Mile in 1994

Compared to the other inns and taverns that once comprised The Mile, the Derbyshire Yeoman was a modern pub, opened by Ind Coope and Allsop, later Allied Breweries, in time for Christmas 1959, where Kingsway meets Ashbourne Road.

Apart from being the obvious launching pad for The Mile, the Yeoman’s large meeting room made it an ideal venue for wedding receptions, birthday parties, discos, antique fairs – and those so-called “gentlemen’s evenings”. In 1990, Allied sold the pub to Marstons, who, a year later, closed it and sold the building to McDonalds. Plans to demolish it altogether were thwarted but it was radically altered.

Question -1 of 11Score -0 of 0

The Travellers Rest is now the start of the Mile but what is the classic schoolboy error made by novice milers?

Milers were left to begin anew, but at least there was now no need to brave crossing the Ring Road. The Travellers’ Rest at 185 Ashbourne Road became the new starting line. According to local historian Maxwell Craven, a pub of that traditional name had been on the site since at least 1857 but moved into the present building in the late 1880s.

Its distinctive split façade of a stone ground floor and black and white timbered upper storey was now the beginning of The Mile. However, there was trouble ahead for the licensed trade.

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Pub ideas

In 2014, Andy Thornewill, landlord of the Travellers’ Rest, told the BBC that pubs had been hit by a triple whammy: management companies taking too much out of the business; the smoking ban keeping smokers away; inexpensive booze from supermarkets. “Cheap beer, cheap spirits and wine – I can't compete against that," he said. Happily, the Travellers’ Rest survived.

Those still wishing to “do” The Mile start their journey there.

(Image: Derby Telegraph)

Milers of old then walked the short distance to the Waggon and Horses, further down Ashbourne Road.

There by name at least from 1833, the pub was rebuilt in the late 19th century. Just before the First World War, when Pountains owned it, was brewing beer on the premises.

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Alas, like the Derbyshire Yeoman, the Waggon and Horses has also been wiped from the face of The Mile map. The building is now apartments.

The Waggon and Horses Pub in Ashbourne Road (Image: @TarkId=431187)

Old Milers had to cross the road for their next two ports of call: the Swan and Salmon on the corner of Ashbourne Road and Chandos Pole Street; and the Gallant Hussar on the corner of Ashbourne Road and Noel Street.

Both were once in the hands of Offiler’s Brewery. Both dated from the 19th century. Here again there is disappointment. Those two small, snug “back-street” pubs, both closed in 2009. One is now a shop, the other a private dwelling.

The Gallant Hussar pub in Ashbourne Road (Image: Derby Telegraph)

There is now quite a walk to the next venue. Before modern Milers leave Ashbourne Road they call at Mr Grundy’s, a bar set in the Georgian House Hotel.

The hotel has been in this Regency house since 1967, Mr Grundy’s bar since May 1996, five years after the demise of the Derbyshire Yeoman.

Today it is, in my humble opinion, the jewel in The Mile’s crown.

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A fine selection of Real Ales, and in the bar an eclectic collection of items, including a large brass candlestick that looks like the sort of murder weapon that might have featured in an Agatha Christie whodunit.

In Friar Gate, what was the Wheel from the 1770s, and later became the Garrick, the Thirsty Scholar and is now The Mile – see what they did there? – sets Milers off on the last lap.

The Swan and Salmon in Ashbourne Road (Image: Derby Telegraph)

First to the Greyhound, which many people thought was named for the nearby former dog track in Vernon Street but which in fact was here about 150 years before the old Derby prison was converted for racegoers.

Then to the Friary Hotel, which was once the family home of Henry Boden. Apparently his widow never recovered from the fact that, after she sold the house in 1922, new owners opened it as a hotel with licensed premises. She and her late husband had been devout members of the Temperance movement.

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Cheers! All the latest pub and bar news

The Rising Sun at 114 Friar Gate has changed a lot since my great-grandfather was the landlord in the 1850s, when this was a 16th-century low brick-clad timber-framed building with a thatched roof, a far cry from the pub that was rebuilt in 1888 and which went under the same name before subsequently being called the Friar Gate and, today, the Bishop Blaise, whoever he was.

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Was the Buck on the Park on The Mile? I can’t remember, but it should have been because it stood at Friar Gate’s junction with Curzon Street. The Buck in the Park, too, has been consigned to local history.

Now the self-respecting Miler of old faced one last hurdle: the Lord Nelson, which has stood at the corner of Wardwick and Curzon Street since at least 1827. Today, restored to its original name, it still marks the true end of The Mile – which, to be accurate, should be called The One Point One Mile, for it is slightly longer than the distance which, back in 1954, Sir Roger Bannister was the first to run in less than four minutes.

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Today the number of pubs has dwindled – although the Last Post and the Brick and Tile, very slightly off the beaten track, may be incorporated – but there are still those who maintain tradition. For them The Mile is still the one to do.

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